


all the king's horses and all the king's men

by philthestone



Series: through this, our hearts sustained [3]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Mentions of Violence, and murderous mob bosses, anyways i love doug judy with all my parts have a nice day, my actual son douglas judy and his actual son jacob peralta, this is all emily's fault, u know .... the usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-09
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 18:21:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7724932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Jake howls Doug Judy's name into the air with fury, it is totally and completely justified.</p><p>“It’s like that nursery rhyme or whatever,” says Gina, lounging in her chair and blowing on the sparkly coat of polish she’s just applied to her pinky. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t arrest Doug Judy again!”</p><p>“Not helping, Gina,” says Jake in a muffled voice, all the abject desolation of the universe focusing itself on building the image of Jake's face smushed uncomfortably against his desk with no intention of being lifted in the near future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the king's horses and all the king's men

**Author's Note:**

> FOR MY GOOD PAL EMELIUS, who loves Doug Judy somehow more than i do. crazy, right?
> 
> notes at the end, and reviews are season four dropping a line that implies Judy helped Amy and Rosa take down Figgis like the bro he is
> 
> (ie, reviews are blessed and good)

When he’s eight, Jake’s Nana tells him that bad habits are never things that happen on their own, but something that you – however unconsciously – cultivate yourself. You need to nip them at the bud, Nana says, nodding wisely, so that you don’t end up being that fool who picks his nose in a job interview or can’t stand in line for pizza without wiggling his behind to the invisible tune of _If I Were A Rich Man_ without even noticing he's doing it.

Of course, Jake is, in fact, eight years old, and doesn’t quite know what the word _cultivate_ means. But he does think that it would be pretty cool if he could wiggle out all of _If I Were A Rich Man_ with his butt, which is something that he then proceeds to do.

Nana laughs for a whole ten minutes and then tells him to sit down and do his math homework or she’ll cancel cable television. An empty threat, to be sure, but at the time Jake is very offended.

(In retrospect, Jake might say that the fact that he got a B-minus on his math quiz the next day was not because he was concentrating on the movements of his afore-mentioned behind in his seat instead of adding two-digit numbers – but because somehow, somewhere, Doug Judy was plotting his demise.

“Unbelievable,” says Rosa when he tells her this, which Jake translates as _That’s a pretty good theory, Jake,_ so he grins at her and goes back to trying to throw paperclips across the room and into Scully’s wide-open snoring mouth.)

//

To be perfectly candid – a phrase Boyle should definitely not have told Jake about at all last week, because Jake started singing it absently under his breath in the break room while warming taquitos and Rosa nearly _maimed_ him – this particular habit of Jake’s is not one of the more absurd. Jake has many bad habits, which fortunately do not include picking his nose but do include singing all the time, jiggling his legs non-stop, and nurturing a sometimes-problematic doubting of his self-worth that doesn’t seem to want to go away anytime soon, which is annoying on the best of days, really.

He’s pretty sure Amy actually has a list, ordered both alphabetically and by most to least irritating. It’s stowed in her desk drawer to be fetched each time Jake starts Something New that drives her up the wall (last week it was tapping his pen on the desk) and Jake isn’t sure if he should be honoured that she has a whole list dedicated to him or if he should tease her about how much she pays attention to the dumb stuff he does. Which he’s ready to admit would be terribly unfair of him to do, because thinking about it, he realizes that he’s got everything from the exact way Amy’s nose scrunches when she sees cute baby animals to the type of laundry detergent she uses somehow memorized and he never even meant to _do_ that, that's _weird_ \- but – ugh, anyways, whatever. Not the point.

It’s the principle of the thing.

This particular habit – if you could even call it that, Jake says loudly to the voice in his own head, the one time he actually stops to think about it – this particular habit is emotional in its origin and somewhat irrational in its continuation, as all the most terrible of habits are. True to Habit Form, it’s gone through periods of ups and downs, highs and lows, use and misuse alike. Shockingly, it’s not something that was as a result of any sort of choice at all, but completely out of Jake’s control. A logical conclusion that any good detective worth their salt would come to, in fact. And, most of the time – with the exception of the First Ever Time, which was admittedly only a few days after Abject Humiliation, his muscles still screaming in protest from the two thousand pushups somehow done without dying – Jake doesn’t even think before he says it.

(Granted, Jake doesn’t really think before he says most things, excluding perhaps the oral exam at the Academy and that time he called Amy a prissy prim-postured pencil pusher three days into their partnership, but that was only because it was a tongue twister and he needed to _practice_ it.)

(She punched him in the arm and it wasn’t entirely worth all the practice, either.)

Anyway. The irony of it – the true hilarity, which Jake doesn’t realize until he’s old and grey and needs _orthopedics_ , of all things – is that the mere fact that Jake’s made a bad habit of blaming any and all ills that the world decides to throw at him on one Douglas Judy could, in fact, be blamed on Douglas Judy.

(Jake doesn’t think about this. He’s too busy trying to convince Amy to throw one of his many paperclips into Scully’s mouth so that she can miss and buy him a coffee.)

(She doesn’t miss, and Jake thinks that he can actually hear his wallet screaming at him angrily through spacetime.)

//

At first, it’s not particularly frequent. While both his muscles and his ego are dancing up and down a somewhat-sore to screaming-in-agony scale of pain, it doesn’t actually occur to him that this is a possibility. Blaming difficulties both large and small that decide to plague him on the existence of a slippery car thief, much the same way that Gina blames things on misalignments of Mars, is not something that Jake consciously thinks about. In fact, the first time, it’s mostly reasonable, triggered by his collapse onto the couch in the breakroom with a totally-called-for groan of pain and a consequent promise to Amy Santiago that he never wants to move his limbs again.

Amy, who is cutting into a cherry tomato with a knife – incidentally who _does_ that, and why is his brain categorizing it as _cute_ – grimaces in what Jake hopes is supposed to be a sympathetic fashion.

“Sorry, man.”

“My shoulders feel like they’re literally on fire,” Jake tells her, and decides that she is grimacing in sympathy, because she doesn’t even nag him for his flagrantly incorrect usage of the word _literally_.

“Because of the pushups,” Amy nods, continuing to grimace while eating salad, which, also, _ugh_ , who eats salad.

(She’s been eating salad for the past six years he’s known her, but, like, whatever. That doesn’t make it _normal_.)

And then, somewhere in the chaotic space of Jake’s mind, wriggling out between absent daydreams involving Amy’s unfortunately cute salad-eating habits and thoughts of the possibility of consciousness detaching from body, a sentence emerges.

“If it wasn’t for _Doug Judy_ ,” Jake says, putting all of the appropriate venom and disdain into the name, “and his stupid _deception_ , I wouldn’t’ve had to _do_ those push-ups.”

Immediately, the words having left his mouth, the metaphorical veil seems to remove itself and the metaphorical clouds seem to part, and somewhere inside, deep within, Jake realizes for the first time that this is _all Doug Judy’s fault._

(An inaccurate realization, to be sure, as there are many things – Jake’s whole disastrous existence, for example – that could be blamed. Looking back, Jake defends his conclusion on the basis of the agony in his non-existent abs muddling up his thinking and, as they all say: once a habit is formed, you’re screwed.)

(“Who … exactly, are _they_?” asks Amy, looking far too skeptical for someone who actively _enjoys salad._

“Just let me have this one, Santiago,” says Jake, because the break room couch he’d collapsed on smelled terribly of butts and twenty-year-old weird Charles Cheese, or something, and he really can’t be blamed for any bad habits formed.)

//

Over time, it surfaces at varying extremes.

(There’s a moment with the photocopier, for example, which involves Jake dropping a stack of papers because his arms are still sore, eliciting a silent and mutinous, “ _Judy_ …” within Jake’s internal monologue because it is, indeed, still his fault, no matter how indirect.)

Mostly though, the first several months after Judy’s escape don’t garner much knee-jerk growling. Jake certainly doesn’t forget (“Like an elephant,” Jake informs Captain Holt, one fine March Friday, “my eyes are always peeled,” and Captain Holt says, “You’re mixing two metaphors, Peralta, and you’ve spilled soy sauce on your tie.”) (Jake thinks he understands, though; they _are_ homies, after all) –

But for a while, he doesn’t really think of Judy much.

Wait, alright, rephrase: he doesn’t think of Judy _at every waking moment_ , which may have been a thing before but was never a problem exactly and anyway, he’s stopped doing it, so _ha_.

He thinks of Judy a normal amount, and spends the rest of his time thinking of karate trophies and Santiago’s lipstick and cases that _Terry_ thinks can’t be solved, and other Very Important Things. Life in general kind of sucks, but Jake doesn’t tell anyone that except for the small potted cactus that Gina left behind when she moved, which resides in the kitchen nook beside the stove. It’s very understanding.

(There is a moment, very briefly, where Jake is lying in bed at two forty-five in the morning staring dismally at the peeling wallpaper of the ceiling of Gina’s old apartment, trying to come to terms with the realization that he has a Really Big Crush on the person who sits across from him every day at work. Who has a boyfriend, now – a boyfriend who is fiscally responsible and doesn’t jiggle his legs all the time and has probably never shaken his butt to the tune of _If I Were A Rich Man_ \- and very, very briefly, Jake hits an all time low, his sleep-deprived brain wondering if Teddy Wells’ existence isn’t something that Doug Judy somehow orchestrated, just to Ruin Jake’s Life.)

(It’s two forty-five in the morning and Jake allows himself all the melodrama he needs, because Amy wears lipstick now after work and his heart is maybe screaming along with his wallet, except that’s weird and he’s not exactly sure how to describe what it feels to _like_ -like her, so sue him.)

(Jake stares at the ceiling until his eyes are physically incapable of remaining open and shows up to work the next morning a half-hour late, and when Terry gives him a severe look over his morning Activia, Jake nearly blurts out, “It’s Judy’s fault!” on instinct.

He’s never been particularly good at nipping those bad habits at the bud, anyway.)

//

Aside from that one time while undercover when he lets Dave Legatto Who Owes The Iannucchis A Lot of Money run off into the night without killing him ( _yikes,_ he tells the potted cactus later, and doesn’t ask how it’s still chilling at his apartment, totally alive) and is forced to tell Leo that he was tripped up by some punk named Doug Judy while chasing the poor kid, Jake doesn’t take to muttering about Judy or Judy’s stupid record collection _or_ Judy’s stupid eyebrows much until the man himself shows up again.

And then escapes.

Again.

They wore _robes_ together.

It’s like, Abject Humiliation: The Reckoning, That Terrible Sequel That Just Makes You Want To Die, and Jake thinks that it would be perfectly reasonable to scream Judy’s name into the sky with rage for the foreseeable rest of eternity (or maybe just until midnight, which is ten minutes away and Rosa is standing beside him slightly-tipsy and hailing a cab and actually looking sympathetic, but his throat is starting to hurt so the eternity thing has to be scrapped).

Then again, Jake’s renewed habit of blaming everything from the sour milk in his fridge to the paper cut he gets on Monday on Doug Judy could very feasibly be blamed on Judy himself.

“It’s Judy’s fault,” Jake tells Charles during a stakeout where they’re supposed to be keeping a reluctant eye out for a sixty-year-old flasher who’s been terrorizing the corner of Flatbush for the past week. Charles lowers the volume on his Phantom of the Opera CD and looks at Jake with concern.

“What’s his fault, Jake?”

Jake narrows his eyes at the snow falling against the windscreen. “I don’t know, Charles. But it _is_.”

“Something,” encourages Charles (bless him and his curried-hoof loving soul). “ _Something_ is definitely Judy’s fault.”

“Ex- _actly_ ,” says Jake.

Charles hums and nods, which is very validating and which makes Jake think about how lucky he is to have a friend like Charles in the first place, and he’s about to tell Charles this when Charles shrieks in abject horror at Lots Of Naked Grandma running across the street in front of them.

(This, Jake thinks, could also be attributed to Doug Judy; who _knows_ what kind of hoodlums he has under his employ.

Jake does not stop to think that Naked Grandma is not exactly Judy’s style, but that can be forgiven, considering he’s currently chasing said individual through the streets of Brooklyn and trying not to hate his job.)

//

(It is worth taking note of, Jake tells Rosa later, after declaring that he wants to wash his eyeballs out with bleach – that only Doug Judy has the power to make him actually hate his job.

“Peralta,” says Rosa, “what the hell are you talking about.”)

//

On June thirteenth, there is a traffic jam on the way to work. Jake groans so loudly that his cup of coffee nearly spills all over his pants.

“Dammit, Judy!”

In August, the photocopier jams and Jake loses three collars.

Whispered mutinously into the desk as the stupid smirking teenager in front of him asks if he can leave: “… _Judy_.”

Once, while on a date with Amy, the restaurant they’re at gets robbed and Jake is shoved into the icebox of cabbage behind the counter. When Amy turns back with cuffs around the dude’s wrist to the image of him spitting out bits of chopped cabbage – the _worst_ vegetable, okay, especially _raw_ , he didn’t even know raw cabbage was allowed to _exist_ – Jake narrows his eyes at the guy in front of him, who is sporting an eerily familiar goatee.

Amy’s grinning triumphantly at the pouting guy. “Serves you right for ruining our date! Don’t you agree, Jake?”

“JUDY.”

//

(It’s not him, _obviously_.

Yes, Amy Santiago, I _know_ it’s not him. _God_.)

//

Anyway. Doug Judy may have escaped again after nearly dying or whatever, and yelling things through a probably-illegally-acquired megaphone, but Jake’s pretty sure that a meteor could strike the Earth at this very moment and it wouldn’t really matter at all because Amy saying she loves him pretty much trumps all bad things in the history of ever.

Or something – something like that. Whatever it is, it’s _good,_ and there’s a small part of Jake that still can’t believe it’s fully wholly completely real, that this is a real thing that’s really happening in his life and he’s no longer resorting to confiding his woes to the potted cactus in his kitchen because he’s in a relationship with Amy Santiago and she loves him.

They’ve made it back to their new dope suite, past the strung-up lights on deck and the music coming from the restaurant. Amy’s calves are bumping up against the edge of the mattress because Jake’s kissing her, the incredible brilliant selfless _wonderful_ woman in front of him, and he can’t stop saying _I love you_ with every breath he takes, for some reason. It’s gotten to the point that she’s actually started laughing, giggles slipping out against his lips. She pokes him gently in the ribs as he presses kiss after kiss to her face, barely even caring if he’s hitting her lips.

“ _Mmph_ – I love you – I love you too – you weirdo.”

Jake pulls away and grins at her, very slightly sheepish and a little breathless. It can be safely stated that not a single iota of his brain is thinking about Doug Judy right now.

Amy’s hands have come up to cup his face and he can feel her smiling hugely against his lips, and everything feels like it’s glimmering with sunlight even though that’s likely only the cabin lights, really bright above them. He should probably dim them, he thinks vaguely, even as he can feel himself instantaneously relaxing into the kiss, each and every muscle in his body responding automatically to her movements in a way that people in movies and Charles say means they’re soulmates or whatever, only they’ve kind of been partners for eight years and sometimes when they’ve been working cases overnight they actually start finishing each other’s sentences, so Jake’s not sure if that’s a reasonable hypothesis.

Jake’s shirt buttons get stuck for a fumbling thirty seconds and Amy ends up overbalancing and falling back into the Dope Suite Pillows and Jake nearly pokes her in the eye with his nose, except then she laughs and her eyes are big and liquid and dark, lips pulled back in a laugh that is relaxed and heedless in a way she rarely is. The part of Jake’s brain that isn’t tripping out at the fact that she _loves_ him or warm and fuzzy and distracted because her hands are braced against his ribs thinks: _perfect_.

Which makes him immediately pull away – his hand slips against the bedpost and he falls down on his elbows on top of her, his yelp muffled by the fabric of her dress – because there is something indescribably perfect about Amy Santiago in this moment and everything else, probably, should also be perfect.

“Wait,” Jake manages, scrambling upwards into a sitting position and nearly getting his feet tangled in his discarded pants. Amy leans upwards with him, eyebrows quickly creasing into a question. Still perfect, Jake thinks vaguely, and then thinks, _Get a grip, Peralta_ , and manages: “Wa-it. Wait – um, I just – hang, hang on? Just one – one sec.”

“Jake, what –”

Jake scrambles to his feet, trips off of the bed and waves his hands in front of him in what he’s pretty sure is the universal gimme a sec gesture. Probably.

“This has to be – the lights and stuff, this is gonna be _special_ –”

She laughs, bright and bubbling like that’s not what she was expecting; she’s sitting on the bed and she’s pulled her legs up into criss-cross-applesauce position, of all things, and Jake’s heart trips a little when he swivels back to look at her, hand fumbling with the bedroom lights. She’s still wearing her flowery red dress, and she’s gathered the blue button-down that her mother had given him the previous Christmas into her hands, fingers playing absently with the embroidery.

 _Perfect_.

Jake turns the knob for the lights down and bounds to the other side of the suite, his bare feet slipping over the carpet. There was a stack of CDs sitting on the dresser that he’d noticed earlier because he’s a brilliant genius-slash-detective, obviously, and he tosses them around now, lip caught between his teeth and keenly aware that he’s still a little breathless and Amy’s hair is a little mussed and –

“Gotcha,” Jake mutters, flipping open the CD case with the words _Romantic Music_ written on the front in neat block letters and sticking the disk into the stereo. He jabs his finger against the _play_ button and runs back to the bed, foot catching on a lone sandal except that it’s okay, he totally recovers and makes it look like he was intending to jump onto the bed face-first, it’s good, he’s good, the mood is in- _tact_.

 _Obviously_ , Jake reassures himself, and then momentarily forgets how to think altogether, because Amy’s grabbed his face again and she’s perfect and everything’s perfect and he wants to gasp _I love you_ for the billionth time only his mouth is a little occupied, and –

The smooth, jazzy piano music that Jake’s subconscious had filtered out with an absent _noice_ has transitioned into vocals. Jake feels Amy’s hands still against his shoulders.

He freezes.

Oh, no.

Oh, _no_.

He _knows_ that voice.

Jake pulls away, momentarily too shocked to do anything other than stare at Amy’s flushed and surprised face, exactly half a second before his eyes widen in Abject Agony And Outrage.

“Jake –” Amy starts, the sort of tremor underneath her voice that means she’d be wheezing with laughter right now if she wasn’t so shocked.

But Jake’s already slammed his face into the pillow.

Which means that his howl of outrage is muffled, which is immensely insulting.

(“ _JUUUUUU-DYYYYYYY!” comes out as more of a strangled “ _MMMHHHHHHOOOOONNNNNGGGGGEEE!”_ , which makes him sound like George of the Jungle if he were infinitely less ripped and also had just been betrayed by Doug Judy’s terribly good singing voice.)_

(He can feel Amy’s whole frame shaking with laughter above him as she combs her fingers through his hair consolingly, Doug Judy’s crooning voice only very slightly off-tune and jazzy as it filters into the suite from the stereo speakers.

God _damn_ it.)

//

Jake thinks later that Doug Judy somehow _knew_ that Jake was going to play that stupid CD, which is why he’d put the CDs there to begin with. Jake also thinks later that Doug Judy’s otherworldly ability to _know_ is probably what lands him in Florida sometime halfway through June, gaping at Jake from across a Safeway and about to open his mouth. Jake moves on instinct, his fingers going numb, diving over the tower of canned vegetable soup between them to clamp a hand over Judy’s mouth and drag him into the cereal aisle in a way that is totally smooth and action-movie-worthy and not conspicuous at all.

“Ow, ow ow _ow_ , my beautiful hands – damn, Peralta, your reflexes must’ve gotten a bump or _something_ –”

“Your hands are normal!” says Jake. “And be _shhhh!_ ”

“My hands are known in the criminal underbelly as unparallelled,” starts Judy, and Jake is thankful that he doesn’t comment on “be shhh”. Jake’s a little rattled, so sue him. Or, not, because he still mostly owns fifty dollars and the mattress he and Amy bought and he’d probably be a crappy suee. Is _suee_ a wor –

“ _Shhhh!_ ” hisses Jake again, shaking his head to force himself to focus on the infuriating man in front of him. Maybe later, he’ll register the ache of familiarity under his own panic, the way his whole chest eases up and tightens and the annoyingly familiar face that’s cropped up against all odds and the FBI and God’s will, probably, here in the middle of the palm-tree filled Florida monotone. 

Right now, though, he keeps his fingers twisted around Judy’s wrist. Judy raises his eyebrows and leans forward.

“It’s nice to see you too, man,” says Judy, thankfully whispering, though his voice is irritatingly cheerful even as his head bumps into a box of those Kashi muesli mixes that Amy loves so much. “You on vacation or something?”

“I’m –” Jake swivels his head around, fingers still digging into the knock-off silk of Judy’s suit jacket, and scans the empty cereal aisle. “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” he says, his voice still a furious whisper, “but you can’t call – I’m _not_ – I’m not Peralta. I’m – I’m _Larry_ , okay, call me Larry and _God_ , Judy, what the hell!”

Judy looks duly unimpressed, and pointedly pries his wrist out from under Jake’s fingers before responding.

(Jake is suddenly overcome with the impulse to tell him that he, too, thinks the name Larry is the lamest possible choice in the whole universe for an undercover persona.)

(It’s not an undercover persona, not really at all, but – it helps. Sometimes. To think about it like that.)

“You mean ‘what the hell’ like, what am I doing here, or, ‘what the hell, why’d you call me by my real name even though you _clearly_ wouldn’t know’ –”

“Yes!” says Jake. “No. Both. Ugh, you’re the _worst!”_

“Dude,” says Judy. “If you’re not on vacation, you probably need to be. You look like you haven’t slept in a month.”

Jake’s hands fall limply to his sides.

He doesn’t think about the washed-out light that shone in the room where they’d met with the FBI agents, the way Amy’s fingernails had dug into his palms at the words _witness protection_. He doesn’t think about Rosa’s pale face, her lips pressed so hard against each other they were purpling, or the way Charles kept shaking his head, or the hoarse voice with which Captain Holt had announced that he needed to go call Kevin, so if no one could disturb him, thank you for your consideration squad.

He doesn’t think about the way he’d said, sitting at the table with the end of his voice cracking with something (desperation, maybe, even though he isn’t actually sure that one word is enough to describe what it feels like when big pieces of the world seem to be dropping out from under your feet, and – well, Jake’s never been good with emotions, anyway) –

The way he’d said, “I bet this is another one of Doug Judy’s schemes,” a stretched, voice-cracking laugh chasing after the word _schemes_ in partnership with the distressed pinching of Rosa’s face.

Amy’s fingernails bit harder into his palm and Jake had wanted to cry.

Jake swallows back whatever the hell is abruptly tightening his throat _now_ and glances back down the aisle again.

(Larson had stared at him.

“Um,” said Jake, and the lights above them felt dead, just a little bit. “Um, bad, bad joke. Sor – sorry.”)

“Shut up,” he says, now, “and – just _God._ Shut up and follow me. I’ll explain somewhere else.”

There must be something about his face – the desperation or the anger or maybe even the lick of actual fear – that makes Judy’s usually-infuriating dimpled smile slip away, morphing into a frown as Jake pulls away and shoves his hands into his pockets, nearly crashing backwards into the Lucky Charms on the adjacent shelf when his foot gets caught in his other sandal.

It’s only later, in Ho – _Greg’s_ – house, with Judy sitting at the kitchen table and sipping the iced lemonade Mrs. Murphy down the street had brought them that morning out of a sensible straw, that Judy gapes at him. His expression flashes from disbelief to excitement to – outrage? – to something Jake would have realized was sympathy had Judy not said, “You mean, you’re stuck here, and _I’m_ here, and ya’ll can’t arrest me?”

Jake plants his face into the table, rather violently. It makes a _thud_ sound, anyway, and when Captain Holt says, “Unfortunately, no,” in perfect monotone, Jake thinks there might be a hint of concern somewhere in there.

Except then Judy says,

“You had to leave everyone behind,” in a soft, un-Judy-like voice, and Jake lifts his head up from the table blearily. Judy’s looking at him, a tightness to his lips that Jake’s not familiar with. He glances at Captain Holt, who is standing there in the most sensible Hawaiian shirt Jake has ever seen (it’s yellow, and has dainty white flowers patterned all over it. Briefly, Jake thinks that Amy would probably declare it _beautiful_ ).

“Mister Judy,” says Holt. “It is paramount that you do not reveal our location to anyone. We have no legal ability to detain you, but I’m not above informing our FBI correspondents of your whereabouts.”

Jake wants to say that Judy’s probably already told half of New York’s criminal populace, somehow, _he could do it_ – and maybe it’s harsh of Jake, but he’s pretty sure he left his tact somewhere in the north of Virginia, during that awful road-trip that he’d wanted for so long but left him feeling like he was eight and he’d snuck a swig of Darlene’s bottle of vanilla extract again.

Only, there’s suddenly a hand against his arm – gripping tightly in a way that makes Jake’s snapping _don’t_ die in his throat – and Judy actually looks _offended_.

Like, he can’t believe they’d even think he’d rat them out.

“I can’t _believe_ you’d even think,” says Judy, “that I’d – that I’d tell –”

“Mister Judy,” says Holt, still standing there in that – that _nice_ shirt. “Forgive me, but I’m merely taking into account your criminal history and penchant for deceiving the NYPD.” He pauses, tilting his chin infinitesimally. _Infinitesimally_ is a good word, Jake thinks, if totally too long. Amy taught it to him, maybe a year into their partnership. She actually had a dictionary app downloaded onto her phone and everything – “Specifically for deceiving Jake.”

“I don’t,” says Judy, his lemonade abandoned on the edge of the table. The straw is bobbing, lopsided, and Judy’s voice has a funny, strangled quality to it. “Jeez, man, I don’t want him _dead_.”

He looks at Jake, all traces of his earlier cheerfulness or the waggling of eyebrows when he’d realized he was un-arrestable – all of that vanished. Jake’s not sure what’s taken its place, but he doesn’t want to deal with it, so he frowns at the table instead. Judy falls silent and pulls his hand away. Holt – Greg – clears his throat.

“We appreciate your … ah –”

“Concern?” Judy offers, a sliver of his usual self reinserted into his voice.

“Yes,” says Holt, his voice quite suddenly impossibly tired. “That. Thank you. You’re welcome to the arrowroot cookies in the pantry for as long as you wish to stay here.”

Jake lets his face plant into the table again, but this time it doesn’t make much of a noise. There’s a long silence, and Jake’s eyes are tracing the grain of the polished wooden table, so close to his face that it’s making him go cross-eyed, when Judy’s voice sounds again.

“God, man, I’m … I’m so sorry.”

(He wonders if the hostility he’s feeling is even specifically towards the man in front of him drinking Mrs. Murphy’s lemonade or if it’s just a result of the overwhelming feeling of helplessness that’s been clawing at his gut since that night in the pale lighting of the FBI briefing room – or the lethargy that’s been washing over him in waves, the persistent inability to get out of bed in the mornings not having been this bad since he was in his first year of college and Nana passed away.)

Jake scoffs. “Whatever, _Judy_.”

He keeps his head there until he hears the front door close, and only then does he let his throat finally do its thing and close up, the ache migrating from his esophagus to behind his eyes.

//

It’s been two days and Jake’s pretty sure Amy has literally been touching some part of his body for the entire forty-eight hours of it, even as she stands in the neat office and actually raises her voice when talking with a person who may possibly – nay – will _definitely_ one day influence her career.

Then again, this isn’t exactly a shocking feat. In the past two days, she’s managed to hold his hand while doing generally logistically-complicated things like cooking, or driving, or even changing clothes, so standing in an office yelling is actually pretty low on the “amazing things Amy Santiago is capable of when touching some part of Jacob Peralta’s anatomy” scale.

“Wait,” Jake says out loud. “That came out wrong.”

Amy stops mid-diatribe, Rosa stops pacing wrathfully in front of the polished desk, and the Police Commissioner stares at him and raises an eyebrow.

“… Came out wrong, Detective?”

“Nothing,” Jake says, trying for a smile and feeling a little dizzy. It’s been two days and he’s only really slept for the five hours after they got home, and it’s getting difficult to focus his eyes. He’s pretty sure he might be hearing colours, which is unfortunate, and he really wishes they could go back to him and Amy pressed up against each other fully-clothed atop of the covers in her – _their_ – apartment, holding each other more tightly than Jake thinks he’s ever been held before and sleeping, because that was – that was a good thing. Sleeping, that is. But sleeping with Amy, specifically – no, wait, that came out wrong too.

Maybe the jet lag’s catching up to him. 

( _It’s the same time zone, Peralta,_ says Holt’s voice in his head).

“Nothing,” he repeats, his voice a little strangled. “Nothing came out wrong. Please, uh, continue.”

“Ridiculous,” says Amy, turning back to the Commissioner and picking up right where she left off, mid-sentence. “This is ridiculous, sir, he’s _saved lives_ , he helped take down the biggest crime lord New York has seen in _years_ –”

“Any cop would be receiving a medal of valor,” snaps in Rosa, turning on her heel so abruptly that her black curls whip around and nearly fly into Jake’s right eyeball. She looks stiff, more so than usual, her hands balled up into fists and her breathing tight and controlled like she’s trying to be reasonable but just _really goddamn tired_.

Jake thinks that they’re all a little exhausted.

“And that’s something both of _you_ will, actually, be receiving, Detective Diaz,” snaps Garmin, pressing a finger to the bridge of his nose. “Doug Judy, however, has an unfortunately checkered past and a history of not-exactly petty crimes! He helped you on _one_ case, that warrants lowered sentence, maybe, not a full-on pardon –”

“We couldn’t have done it without him,” Amy is insisting, hand warm and tight and grounding against Jake’s elbow. “He risked his life _repeatedly_ – just, sir, you can’t just – Jake can back us up, here. Judy deserves a pardon!”

Amy’s subtle plea is perhaps not as subtle as she thought it’d be, because Garmin visibly rolls his eyes as he looks over at Jake. Across the room, Rosa’s dark eyes have widened imperceptibly, holding Jake’s gaze.

There’s something fuzzy in his brain, that’s maybe translated itself into cotton balls in his mouth. He can still feel Amy’s hand on his elbow, her grip tightening and almost pinching his skin. Rosa’s still looking at him.

Very slowly, with Garmin’s attention on Jake, she lifts her hand up and grasps the pendant of her necklace, balling her fist over the gold coin.

_One thousand pushups._

Something around Jake un-constricts.

“She’s right,” Jake says, unsure if he’s talking about Amy or Rosa or both. “Judy’s never hurt anyone, sir, he – he can do community service or something, it’s –”

“Never _hurt_ anyone?” Garmin’s features twist into a weird kind of grimace as he considers this, looking as though _genuinely surprised_ had a baby with _just swallowed a whole lemon_ – as though he suspected a person with so many altercations on his rap sheet to have done at least some more damage than simply stealing cars.

“Like, not – not directly, sir, I mean not physically – just –” Jake swallows, and Rosa’s hand is still clutching her necklace, and Jake remembers the package in the mail he’d gotten four months into Florida, the package that pretty much explicitly broke the rules and also brought tears to his eyes.

(The package that had a USB with a three minute, blurry video of Amy and Rosa sitting on the couch eating chicken lo mein and singing along to Taylor Swift, and a framed picture of Captain Holt and Kevin in formal dress, both smiling at the camera with their arms around each other. The package with the hand-written note: _hang in there, peralta, they’re all doing okay. I gotchu, fam_.)

“Detective –” starts Chief Garmin, but Jake swallows and shakes his head.

“Doug Judy’s a criminal, sure, but he’s a –” A pause, a swallow, this is the most _surreal_ – “he’s a good guy. He’d never harm anyone on purpose and he’s – he’s done so much, these past few months. We all – you owe him just as much as we do.”

“I _owe_ him?”

Jake can feel Rosa’s mouth twitching and Amy’s sigh of relief beside him and he suppresses the absurd urge to laugh. God, he’s _so_ tired. Maybe he’s hallucinating.

“Y-yes, sir.”

“Detectives –”

It’s at exactly this moment that the door opens and a person Jake’s frazzled brain identifies as Garmin’s assistant bursts through the door, his tie askew and his glasses perched lopsidedly on his nose and actually panting like this is one of those cheesy rom coms Jake’s mom used to watch with him all the time after she came home from work, where she made it a game to try to guess how many of the actors were Jewish, but it’s like they’re actually living the climax where someone bursts in and announces that there’s some dude pulling a ridiculous yet breathtakingly sweet and romantic move in the downstairs lobby.

Except this is One Police Plaza and not the headquarters of a women’s magazine, and the assistant – his name is Jean, Amy informs him later, God, how does Amy remember _everyone’s_ names – shoves his glasses up his nose, waves the phone in his hand in front of him and says,

“He’s _gone!_ ”

“What,” says Garmin.

“What,” says Rosa.

“What,” say Jake and Amy together, at the same time, which Jake privately thinks is kind of cute, way to go them.

“S-sir,” splutters he-who-will-later-be-named-Jean. “I’m sorry to interrupt –”

“You’ve already interrupted,” Garmin reminds him. “Who’s gone?”

“They’re at the holding room!” says Jean, looking more frazzled than Jake feels, which Jake personally thinks is an impressive feat, but also a little unfair, considering Jake’s probably been through more than Jean has in the past forty-eight hours.

Then again, who knows. Jean could be truly suffering. Jake doesn’t know his life.

“The holding –”

“I don’t understand,” says Amy, looking between the assistant and Garmin and Rosa, her big eyes narrowed and her posture tense. “What’s going on.”

“He left a note,” says Jean weakly, still holding up the phone.

“He left a _note_ ,” repeats Garmin, who looks unfortunately pale. “Does it have any leads to where he might have –”

“What,” says Rosa. Her smudged eyeliner does nothing to help how impossibly terrifying she looks in that moment. “Is going _on_.”

“Um,” says Jean. “The – the note! Ah, they said, um, it said – well, ah.”

“Ah?” prompts Garmin, and Amy says, “Ah,” too and Jake is a little bummed that their couple-y chorusing of words is now being shared by the Police Commissioner as well, who Jake is belated remembering he once lowkey blackmailed and that’s probably why Garmin looked so unimpressed when Jake first shuffled into his office.

“Ah. Well.” Jean clears his throat and looks at his phone, as though reading off a text. “He said … ‘tell Rosa I love her’?”

Jake blinks. Amy’s hand drops away from his elbow. Rosa swivels around to face Jean, who seems to only then realize exactly who ‘Rosa’ is, and Garmin’s mouth is doing something that reminds Jake of the goldfish Gina once kept as pets when she was ten.

They all died, but that’s not important right now, because Amy’s bypassed the outraged, “You put him in _holding?”_ that will be yelled later by Rosa, to opt for a simple exclamation of shock (uttered in rather good company, if Jake does say so himself) as he, Amy and Rosa groan all at once:

" _Judy._ ”

Garmin looks as though he very much wants to throw Jean out the window.

Poor Jean.

//

The thing about uttering Judy’s name like a curse into the sky, Jake tells Rosa while he sits perched on one of the boxes in the evidence lockup, is that it’s totally understandable but also, I’m so proud of you Rosa, you learned that from _me_.

“I did not,” says Rosa, articulating her words very carefully, “use his name like a curse.”

“Um,” says Jake. “I heard you. Just now, Diaz, I have _excellent_ hearing –”

“He put a box in the wrong place, dumbass.”

“He – what?”

“When he was in here a few months ago, he put a box down where it could easily fall over like a dumb-dumb and it just did.”

“What.”

“It _fell over_ – Jesus, Jake, it’s like I’m talking to a wall.”

“No,” says Jake, blinking twice and wanting to say, _what the hell, Doug Judy was here in the precinct,_ “no, I mean – what the hell, Doug Judy was _here?_ ”

“Um,” says Rosa, her voice suddenly taking on an odd, tight quality. “Once. Just – it was an emergency – it doesn’t matter!” She crosses her arms and leans forward. “I told him not to move that box. And what did he do?”

“He moved that box,” guesses Jake, even though every part of his brain is screaming _Doug Judy risked his freedom and came into a police precinct willfully, why, why did he do that, did they offer him a deal, what trick did he have up his sleeve, maybe he wore a disguise –_

“It was Charles,” says Rosa, suddenly. Her voice is stiff and she looks down at her shoes, and then up again, and her face is tight the way it is when she’s talking about something important to her. “He let Charles pretend to arrest him so they could retrieve some evidence without us having to send Amy back – back here.”

Jake swallows.

(He remembers seeing the little white car he’d come to know so well go up in flames in the front of the precinct, remembers the way his whole body had gone numb and he’d dropped Holt’s box of arrowroot cookies and had to excuse himself, after fifteen minutes of Garcia briefing them in the living room about how everything was fine, so that he could go and throw up in the sink.

 _Reports say that it was a freak accident, triggered when a thief attempted to hot wire the car’s engine on Monday morning_ –)

“It’s okay, you know,” says Jake, after a moment. His voice is a little funny, but that’s okay too. “If you want to yell his name into the sky sometimes.”

“I had,” says Rosa, “a _valid_ reason.”

“I started a trend,” Jake tells her, the cheerfulness slipping back into his voice with ease, and fully intends on walking back upstairs and wrapping Amy in a bear hug the moment he can drag her out of the bullpen and into a hallway.

“Unbelievable.”

(Which Jake assumes means _Yes, of course Jake, you’re a regular bad habit icon,_ and he grins.

Rosa grins back – which, _wow_ , terrible crime lords should rip their family apart more often if it means she’s stopped punching him in the arm –

Wait, no, there it is.)

“ _Ow_ ,” says Jake, rubbing his arm.

“Go upstairs and tell Santiago you love her, weirdo.”

(At least Rosa’s no-bullshit sixth sense hasn’t changed while he was away.)

“We’re working on the Litheman case, I came down here for _evidence!”_ Jake yells after her retreating back. “Also, you totally yelled Judy’s name because of me and joke’s on you, Diaz, I tell Amy I love her _every_ day!”

She calls him a loser over her shoulder, which is fine.

“ _Judy,_ ” mutters Jake anyway, absent and annoyed under his breath.

//

Their hotel room has a balcony.

How swanky is _that_.

It’s been roughly … twenty-four hours, Jake thinks, maybe, since they stumbled through the door full of giggles and maybe a bit too much champagne. Carrying a wedding-dress-clad Amy Santiago piggyback over the threshold of their swanky hotel room was not something Jake had ever thought would be one of the most delightful moments of his life, and yet, three or four hours later, after several long stretches of laughter, extensive mattress trampolining, gasping in delight over their balcony view, and the terrible incident with The Underwear, he lay on his back listening to Amy’s soft breathing and wondered if this was hat it would hypothetically feel like to walk on air.

Now, Jake’s standing at the same threshold grinning toothily at the person on the other side.

“The room service you ordered,” says the nice-looking lady with the red hair and shiny metallic tray of food, standing in the doorway.

“Thank you,” says Jake. And because it’s not like his brain-to-mouth filter has ever been particularly stellar in the first place: “We’re married.”

There’s a beat.

“That’s nice,” says Room Service Lady.

“The view here is also, um, very nice,” Amy tells her from behind Jake. “I mean – yeah. That’s, it’s, it’s very nice.” She’s rocking back and forth slightly on the balls of her feet, her old purple bathrobe that she’s owned for the past million years wrapped tightly around her. She hasn’t stopped grinning since five p.m., her smiles increasing and decreasing in equal parts brilliance and softness. “We can see the ocean from here!”

“Like married people,” adds Jake. “Married people who watch oceans together.”

“I like to watch oceans too,” says Room Service Lady, just a little bit slowly, looking slightly concerned. “Is there anything else I can get you, Mister –?”

“Santiago,” says Amy primly; Jake, who is wearing pajama bottoms with Spiderman on them, whirls around and makes a very offended face.

“We _hyphenated_ , you traitor!”

(They did not, in fact, legally hyphenate, though Jake feels as though he has every right to wave the concept in Amy’s face each time they tell people they’re married.

This is, officially, the first time they’ve had to tell someone they’re married. “Had” being an interpretive term, of course.)

“We just got married,” Amy explains again, ignoring him and smiling and nodding, for the second time, at Room Service Lady.

“You … you mentioned,” says Room Service Lady, looking slightly confused, now, a novel addition to the previous _concerned_ that was wriggling its way into her plucked eyebrows and lipstick-covered lips. Politely befuddled, Jake thinks – _flummoxed_ , even. Jake can’t say why she’d be flummoxed, though – people get married all the time, don’t they?

Anyway:

“That’s true,” says Jake, mock-offended look immediately vanishing and turning back to face her. “Totally married people, who are wedded.”

He’s holding their swanky room service tray in his hands, now, having taken it from the lady. He’s pretty sure they’d ordered french fries – or did Amy finally decide on that weird salad thing? With chicken? And there should be champagne somewhere on the cart, probably, Jake can’t quite remember because in the middle of his attempting to figure out how room service worked, sometime in between the mattress trampoline thing (their bed really is delightfully springy) and falling asleep feeling like he was walking on air, Amy had decided to emerge from the bathroom in un-Amy-like (yet very Amy-like) lacy negligee.

(The problem had, of course, arisen when he’d dropped the phone and stared, and Amy, who had completely and totally misread his reaction probably because she had, to Jake’s knowledge, never actually worn this Level of Underwear before, flushed a pretty pink colour and blurted, “Gina chose it!” in a squeaky voice, which immediately made Jake sort of hate the entire universe and his position in it.)

(He’s trying not to think about it too much.)

“That’s nice,” says Room Service Lady again, clasping her hands and looking between them.

“I’m Jake,” says Jake, because they may be on their honeymoon but nice manners are always important, says Amy and his mother and the Sarge, so he figures that’s enough people watching him to make an effort. “And this is Amy, my partner in the field and in the wonderful journey of life.”

“We’re cops,” says Amy. Jake’s fairly sure she’s still smiling and nodding behind him, which she has been doing for the past two minutes, Amy, you need to stop now, it’s getting weird –

“Married cops.”

“Super married.”

“With marriage rings and papers and everything.”

“ _Marriage rings_ , Jake, oh my God –”

Room Service Lady smiles at them looking like she’s found an alligator in her purse, maybe, something that Jake can attest to being the most awful experience of one’s life.

“I’m going to let you two enjoy your – marriage?”

“That would be great,” says Amy, nodding and smiling.

“Alright,” says Room Service Lady. 

Jake waves at her as she leaves.

“The room service at this hotel is delightful,” Amy tells him, plucking the tray from his hands and moving through the bedroom. “D’you know, I’m so happy we just chose to stay here.”

“Other than the fact that Charles has called us twice, one of them involving Captain Holt,” Jake says. He sits on the bed and tries swinging his legs outward experimentally, grinning when Amy turns to give him a look that explicitly means, _you’re thirty-seven years old, stop swinging your legs against the bed_ and simultaneously means, _it’s kinda cute and I guess that’s why I married you, maybe_.

That’s Jake’s interpretation, at any rate.

“We shall agree,” says Amy carefully, perching herself on the armrest of the loveseat across the bed, “never to speak of that again.”

Jake wonders if this is because of the fact Charles had burst into tears on the other side of the line twice – once when Gina asked if they’d already used up all the condoms she stuck in Amy’s bag – or because Captain Holt had said, “Are you … doing well?” after a supremely awkward pause on the other side of the line. Why he had ever been handed the phone in the first place remains a mystery to Jake, who can’t possibly think of a work emergency intense enough to require Captain Holt to tell Jake, “I shall … let you get back to – I mean, continue – I mean. Dismissed, Detective.”

(“Yes, sir,” Jake had said weakly.)

(The fact that Amy was not at that moment in time wearing pants had not helped the situation in the least.)

“Agreed!” says Jake. “Super agreed, I’ll throw Charles off a building if he calls again, and, incidentally, what _did_ you do with the condoms Gina put in your purse?”

“I threw them out,” says Amy, her eyes lighting up as she lifts the lid off the tray. _Salad_ , of all things. Jake would be appalled, but he _did_ marry her, after all. “After the underwear thing. And, babe, that’s chivalrous of you, but you don’t have the upper body strength to throw Charles off buildings.”

“Good call,” says Jake. “And I resent that statement fully and completely. Also, _salad_ , Amy? You used your devious charms to trick me.”

“Not my fault you choked and threw a pillow at me,” she says, raising her chin into the air.

“You –”

“ _Leaving the room service person hanging on the other line_ , I might add –”

“Scandalous and offensive, I know,” says Jake, bouncing his legs. “Your hair is super pretty right now.”

“You’re being a weirdo again,” says Amy, but she’s blushing. Watching Amy blush is probably one of the highlights of Jake’s detective career, if he’s being honest, but there seems to be something especially radiant about it now, trickling from the tops of her ears and filling her cheeks with colour.

“Mmmm,” hums Jake, flopping back down on the bed.

“Hey, Jake?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s something weird in my salad.”

“That would be the vegetables, Detective Peralta-Santi –”

Jake yelps as a cherry tomato bounces off his forehead, and he pushes himself back into a sitting position to see Amy frowning at a somewhat damp white envelope that’s held in her hand.

He shuffles off the bed to stand behind her, watching as she turns it over in her hands; it’s simple and smooth-looking and white against Amy’s long tan fingers, and despite its dampness has the look of something that’s been bought from, like, a Hallmark. Jake’s never actually been in a Hallmark, but Amy definitely has, and she taps her nail against the slit opening and hums.

“It looks like it was bought from – Hallmark? Or something?” She cranes her neck to look at him.

“I’ve never been to a Hallmark,” Jake says, “But I trust your judgement. Look, there’s an address on the front.”

He’s right (of course he is, he’s an amazing detective-slash-genius and the smudged black pen is very difficult to miss), and Amy hums again, frowning.

“I have … no idea where this is.”

“It sounds tropical,” says Jake, squinting. “Like it’s got. A lot of vowels.”

“Not all words with vowels in them are tropical, Jake,” says Amy, neatly peeling the envelope open and digging inside. “We can look up the ad – oh my God.”

“Holy Moses,” says Jake, his voice cracking, after a long pause that stretches out for several shocked moments.

“This is … oh my _God_ ,” Amy gasps, her dark eyes widening incrementally. Normally, Jake would be distracted by this, because her eyes are the kind that shine like – he’s not sure, something captivating, maybe chocolate or the moon or something, _God_ when did he get this disgustingly like Charles, but he’s not distracted by looking at his wife, because said wife is clutching two plane tickets to the Caribbean and what looks to be an all-expenses-paid resort pass in her hands.

“Wha – what the –” Jake blinks three times and shakes his head. “We – what? _What?_ ”

“That’s …” Amy swallows, and nods, and then takes a deep breath. “It’s – my name’s on it.”

Jake wonders, for what might be the hundredth time in his life, if he’s hallucinating, not including that time in eleventh grade that Gina convinced him to take a drag of her makeshift cigarette at a party and he’s pretty sure he was _actually_ hallucinating to a medically dangerous degree, but – that’s not the point.

“Ames,” he says, “I know that when you get stressed sometimes you forget things, but are you _sure_ you didn’t –”

“We’ve already established that neither of us have enough money to fly to the Caribbean!” snaps Amy, shaking the tickets, “Because you still have to be careful with budgeting, you’ve made so much progress with the Crushing Debt, and neither of us gets paychecks until next month –”

Except then she stops, because in said shaking of said tickets, a tiny rectangle of card stock has dropped down into Amy’s salad.

They stare at it.

Jake picks it up.

In later retellings, Amy will take great pleasure in telling Rosa that she actually had to spend a whole _twelve hours_ trying to convince Jake to accept an all-expenses-paid honeymoon to a Caribbean resort.

(She does not tell Rosa that she, at one point, lowered herself to threatening a re-donning of the Gina Linetti Approved negligee – a tactic that worked for a whole forty minutes before becoming utterly useless, as it _was_ their honeymoon and negligee is frustratingly easy to remove from anatomy. Amy wonders briefly, aloud, if she should return the things solely for their utter non-functionality before Jake sleepily reminds her that that’s the point of negligee, and she flicks water at him, and he finally agrees to accept the tickets.)

(She does not tell Rosa this, but Rosa is unfortunately still The Worst.

“You totally bribed him,” says Rosa.

“False,” says Amy. “We are two mature adults in a new marriage, based on trust and communication and compromise, and –”

“This is hilarious,” says Rosa. “You bribed him with s –”

“I _threatened_ him with the stupid underwear that _Gina_ suggested I buy, which was, a _terrible_ idea, by the way –” And, her voice raising in pitch over Rosa’s laughter – “Oh, shut up, Diaz, it was the _Caribbean_ for our _honeymoon!”_ )

In later retellings, Amy thinks it her God-given duty to explain to everyone that it really was not at all unreasonable to want to accept the generous gift of plane tickets and fancy resorts.

At this moment in time, Jake stares in horror at the weirdly cursive writing on the cardstock.

_Congrats, Peralta! Think of me when you smush <3_

…

“ _DOUG JUDY_.”

//

It should be stated for the record that the first time Jake has to explain to his eight-year-old son what sex is, it is entirely Doug Judy’s fault.

“When you say, ‘for the record,’” says Amy later that night, “does it mean that I can put those exact words into the family scrapbook?”

“We hab a fam-ly scwapbook?” says Jake, with his toothbrush in his mouth, standing in the bathroom doorway wearing only pajama pants and a single sock and looking truly and completely shocked.

Amy rolls her eyes and goes back to the copy of _A Brief History of Everything_ sitting in her lap.

“No, doofus. I gave up on that after Maya turned one and there was no time to cut cardstock symmetrically.”

“You’we vhe wors’,” Jake tells her, and Amy smiles sweetly.

Right now, Jake’s standing in the kitchen pouring a mix of muesli, Frosted Flakes and store brand rice puffs into three cereal bowls and trying not to let his hands shake. It’s funny: his ribs still ache, and there’s definitely visible bruising turning green-ish around his cheekbone and temple, and his throat is scratchy and hoarse – but the only thing he can think of is the scrapes on Benji’s knees and the way Maya had cried when he hugged her again after three days of _not knowing_ –

Raising children, Jake knows, has thus far been more of a wild ride than any action movie he’s ever seen, and he’s including _Die Hard_ and the sixth Fast and Furious in this assessment, thanks. He and Amy had spent nearly eleven years of their lives putting themselves in dangerous situations every single day, dealing with drug dealers and homicides and people with guns and knives and rampant mental instability. But two children? Two small humans – _tiny souls_ , Amy’s father calls them with so much love in his voice – who are simultaneously so dependent but so independent of him, a _part_ of him in an integral way that nothing else has ever been – is something else entirely.

Jake knows the meaning of sacrifice. He knew it, maybe in the abstract, years ago when he was grappling with the ache in his heart that followed unconsciously the acceptance of things that were out of his control, feelings that he was not entitled to. He knows that some things, you need to detach yourself from, and he knows that marriage is about compromise and communication and trust, and sometimes you have to gently elbow your way through bumps. He knows it when he’s balancing Screaming Baby against the curve of his arm past midnight, bouncing up and down haphazardly on the exercise ball Terry gave them when Amy was first pregnant with Maya and trying not to panic that Benji’s neck is stretching backwards while he avoids the syringe of children’s Tylenol Jake’s trying to aim at his mouth. He knows it when Amy gives up longer hours or the ability to jump-start her career as a captain three years earlier so that she can spend more time with her tiny, growing family, and he knows it when he’s rubbing at his eyes and trying to make it through sheets of tax papers at the kitchen table while Amy grabs four hours of sleep with a twelve-month-old curled up against her chest, both of them utterly exhausted.

(He tells his mother, one day when she breezes through the doorway with her arms already extended to give a delighted Benji a big hug and a kiss, that he understands so much of what she did, now.

“Working two jobs is not the way it should be, sweetheart,” she says softly with her bag slung over her elbow and her hand cupping his scruffy cheek. “That was a choice I was forced to make.”

“I know,” whispers Jake, pressing a kiss against her forehead, and, “I love you,” before Maya bursts into the room with the squeal of “ _Nana Karen!_ ” two steps ahead of her, curls bouncing and feet blessedly clad in those neat children’s socks with grips on the soles so that she doesn’t slip and dive headlong into the shoe rack in the front hall.)

And Jake – whether he be desperately yelling, “Come on, buddy you’re almost done just another squirt of Tylenol, _please!_ ” his voice hitting a note of panic he truly thought he was incapable of making, or watching the tiny text blur together and do backflips on the page in front of him while he googles what acquisition indebtedness means – thinks that he’s handled things pretty well, overall.

Nothing could have prepared him for this, though.

(If it wasn’t his primary goal at this moment in time to keep things light-hearted and the most chill they can possibly be, Jake would say that there is something fundamentally life-changing about the thought that you might never see your children again.)

(“It’s funny,” whispers Amy later that same night, _A Brief History_ sitting abandoned on the bedside table and her knees curling into his thigh. There’s a tremble in her voice as she continues, and Jake presses his face to the crown of her head and inhales, “You were yelling for him to kill you instead and all I could think of was that I couldn’t let him do that but I couldn’t – I _couldn’t_ not see Maya and Benji –”)

There’s sunlight dappling the sink and half of the kitchen table, like it always does in the mornings, peaking through the patterned curtains that Amy hung up two months after they first moved into this apartment.

“– like in the _movies_ ,” Maya’s saying, in the voice she adopts when she’s trying to sound Very Mature. She’s half-skipping, half-trailing at Amy’s feet as they enter the kitchen, almost unconsciously following her mother every time she changes course even slightly rather than standing in one place and speaking, so it looks like Amy has a very talkative shadow dressed in the sparkly SpongeBob pajamas Auntie Gina gave her last year. “I mean, it was definitely _kind_ of like Spy Kids, Mom, but I guess you were right about bad guys being big meanie-pants in real life even if we’re kids.”

Amy has a crease between her eyebrows, the sort that Jake knows is going to remain there for at least a week, held in place by everything that’s happened and _jeez_ , wouldn’t it be so much easier if neither of them had mortal enemies from The Past who were dead set on revenge all these years later.

This is, unfortunately, the same reasoning his children have used to Officially Connect Their Lives To Spy Kids, something that Benji has been trying to _unofficially_ do since they first saw the old illegally-downloaded version of the first Robert Rodriguez film on Tio Luis’s laptop when they were six and four, respectively. Jake guesses that they must have felt some deep spiritual connection to Carmen and Junie Cortez that is only explained by the idiosyncrasies of childhood; Amy is far more practical about it.

(“It’s because of the parents,” she says matter-of-factly, after they come home from the rare event of date night that poked its head into their lives like the endangered American Burying Beetles that Benji can talk about for hours upon hours. Maya and Benji are found asleep on the couch with Rosa, the end credits of _Spy Kids 2: Isle of Dreams_ rolling on the screen.

“The _parents?_ ” says Jake, and his amazing brilliant police captain wife turns on her heel, her hair softening out of its curling iron styling and framing her face. She’s wearing a Date Dress, something that Jake hasn’t seen in awhile, and it’s red and soft and clingy and she so obviously loves it that he can’t help but absolutely love it, too.

Amy raises an eyebrow.

“ _How_ are you an NYPD detective.”

“We’re talking about a kids movie –”

“It’s like, inverted,” says Amy. “Latino dad, white mom – come _on_ , Peralta –”

“Wait,” says Jake, “so I’m, like, at the attractiveness level of Carla Gugino, in my kids’ heads?”)

At any rate, Benji loves Spy Kids even more than he once loved that awfully adorable onsie they’d gotten in the mail from a criminal.

It should be made clear that the criminal was Doug Judy (also known as the _worst_ ) – definitely not anyone like Freddy Maliardi, who chooses guns and death threats over glittery baby clothes to express his familial affection.

Which brings Jake back to pouring cereal into bowls and thinking about the occupational hazards of being a cop – something he contemplates with a heavy sigh, adding regular milk (not chocolate, because chocolate milk is not a part of a balanced healthy diet, apparently) over the cereal. He’s not sure if the occupational hazard is the death threats or getting baby clothes from Doug Judy, and he’s not sure which one of them he’s having more difficulty coming to terms with. So, sure, Judy may have risked his life to help them out a couple times, and okay, maybe he totally gave them the most ballin’ wedding present ever, and also, Jake has to begrudgingly admit that the stupid onsies _were_ pretty cute.

He’s still _literally the worst_ , though.

“Like _Spy Kids?_ ” Amy’s saying, her voice laughing because of _course_ she’s going to laugh with delighted relief at anything either of their children say right now because it’s a source of blessed joy that they’re here, with them, unhurt.

“It _was_ ,” insists Benji, who is clinging to his mother’s neck despite Jake’s worries that it’s only going to aggravate Amy’s injuries, the bruise on her collarbone and the lacerations on her ribs. “You had to _be_ there, Mommy.”

“I _was_ there, _niño_ ,” says Amy with another laugh, easing him into a chair at the kitchen table. Her hair is drawn back into a ponytail and the shadows under her eyes are visible behind her granny glasses, and she looks exhausted, but her smile is warm and full of light. “How was it like Spy Kids, huh? Aside from bad guys,” she adds, raising an eyebrow at Maya, who has opened her mouth wide, about to launch into a defensive and likely very loud explanation.

Jake slides a bowl of cereal in front of her and seizes the opportunity to insert a spoonful into her open mouth before she starts talking and doesn’t eat breakfast for another hour, silently congratulating himself for his smooth moves even though there is nothing more he wants at this moment that to listen to his daughter’s voice for the rest of eternity, maybe, just to make sure she’s okay.

(It’s a mark of how serious everything was that Jake doesn’t pause in his internal monologue to remind himself to relax.)

Maya splutters and starts chewing her cereal resentfully, glaring at him from behind her glasses with milk dribbling down her chin.

“Jake,” Amy chides softly, laughter still in her voice.

(So different from the way she yelled his name until her voice was nothing more than a hoarse, silent scream, every fiber in Jake’s being wanting to turn to her but the thought of Maliardi being in the same _state_ as their children being enough to let the whispered, “Just kill me and leave them alone,” tumble through his lips, a statement without the barest hint of a tremble.)

Jake winks at Maya with his good eye.

“Cereal is part of a healthy nutritious diet,” he says in an exaggeratedly deep voice akin to that of Doctor Romero at the clinic down the street; Maya giggles through her breakfast and more milk spurts out from between her lips, and Jake feels himself shaking with laughter right along with her.

“Daddy!” she manages to gasp after swallowing the mouthful, as Amy leans across the table to hand her a napkin.

“Small spoonfuls, Maya,” says Amy, dabbing with one of the napkins at the wet table, “Dad’s being a goofball, you’re going to get your food everywhere and choke –”

“See, listen to Mom –”

“And, _actually_ ,” says Amy, turning back to him, “I was going to talk to you about this, I was reading the other day and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence coming out that packaged cereals put people at high risk for diabetes –”

“ _Whaaaaaaaaat!_ ” say Maya, Jake, and Benji at once, with all the appropriate horror of normal people about to be told that cereal may have to be cut out of the diet. Maya looks more scandalized than Jake does, and he reminds himself to tell her later how proud of her he is.

“Mmhmm,” says Amy, nodding seriously. “There have been some _serious_ case-control studies done, you guys –”

“Uh oh,” says Jake. “We know how much Mom loves those case-control studies.”

It’s been two days since they were discharged from the hospital with the assurance that everything is going to be okay, that Maliardi is officially in jail and that nobody is very badly hurt and they can go home, now, seriously, just _relax_ for a couple days Captain Santiago – and Jake thinks that everything has gone right back to normal so quickly that it’s maybe giving him a little bit of vertigo.

That could just be the concussion though, he’s not sure.

Either way, they’re sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast and giggling among themselves just as they do every weekend of every week, and Amy is earnestly explaining the high sugar content of cereal and Maya’s curly hair is a rat’s nest because nobody’s bothered to brush it yet, and Benji, because he has a deep and abiding love of the film and is already at the age of eight and one quarter never one to let anything go, says,

“Mommy, it _was_ like Spy Kids, you were kidnapped by bad guys!”

Amy’s laughter dies a little. Silently congratulating himself once more on his smooth moves, Jake finds her fingers under the table and says,

“But loads of movies have bad guys, Peanut.”

“It’s a specific sorta situation,” says Benji seriously, swinging his legs under the table.

“We even met our estranged uncle!” adds Maya, through another mouthful of cereal, and it’s then that Jake’s own laughter trickles away and he and Amy frown at each other.

“… Estranged uncle?” asks Amy.

“Uncle Charles isn’t estranged, Maya-bean,” says Jake. “We should probably dictionary that word, um, Mom, can you –”

“I already dictionaried it,” says Maya, as though this should be obvious (and really, Jake thinks with a sigh, it’s his own fault for even presuming it wasn’t). “On Grandpa Ray’s computer when Tia Rosa sent us to his house – and it’s not Uncle Charles, we’ve _met_ Uncle Charles, Dad, we’d never _met_ him before, that’s why he was estranged!”

 _Duh, Dad_.

Jake thinks that he’s been held hostage for like two days, here, okay, cut him a break, kiddo.

“Tia Rosa called him to help with finding you,” says Benji, his voice getting slightly louder to match his sister’s, and this is where Jake should have probably had a premonition of Doom, similar to what Gina says her psychic sometimes has. A trickle down his spine or something. Or maybe his forehead hurting, like in the Harry Potter audiobooks they have in the glove compartment of their car.

“He said,” says Maya, a moment before Jake’s mouth drops open and his day is officially ruined, the dramatic way, though not worse, Jake decides resolutely, than Maliardi standing above him grinning that God-awful greasy grin and telling him that he had the two beautiful children sitting in front of Jake in a car somewhere, somewhere that Jake couldn’t see their milk-covered faces or listen to them talk about Spy Kids or hug them fiercely and protect them from the world. “He _said_ that he knew you guys from, like, a zillion years ago? _I_ didn’t trust him at first –”

Wait, no, there it is – Jake’s premonition of Utter Doom.

“I liked him,” says Benji resolutely, speaking over his sister. “He used funny words and stuff. What’s a smushing, Daddy?”

There’s a beat.

 _Utter Doom_ , sings a voice in the back of Jake's head that reminds him eerily of Gina's psychic.

“Because,” Maya is saying, as though nothing eventful or familialy-significant has just occurred, “he was like, a stranger, Mom, and you always say not to talk to strangers –”

There is, Jake thinks, literally, not a single other person on the planet Earth that uses that term.

“There is,” says Jake, “literally, not a _single_ other person on the planet Earth –”

“Jake,” warns Amy, the crease between her eyebrows growing.

“ _He_ –”

“What was his name, Maya?” asks Amy in a measured voice, cutting through Jake’s choked out _He_ protests.

“He said his name was Uncle Doug,” says Maya in much the same matter-of-fact fashion that her mother sometimes favors, pushing her glasses up her nose. And then, “He wasn’t a _really_ a stranger though, Mom, I swear, Tia Rosa and Grandpa Ray and everyone knew him –”

“Daddy,” repeats Benji serenely, “what’s a smushing?”

Jake stands up, his chair scraping against the floor a little bit.

“Can you excuse me for a second, Benji?”

“We’re all safe now,” he hears Amy say consolingly while he walks out of the kitchen into the living room. “And that’s what really matters, Maya.”

(“Is Daddy okay?” Maya asks, through another mouthful of cereal, as the outraged and somewhat mutinous cry of “ _JUDY!_ ” sounds from the other room.

“Daddy’s perfectly fine,” says Amy with a sigh, digging into her own cereal. “Don’t speak with your mouth full, baby.”

“ _I_ liked Uncle Doug,” repeats Benji cheerfully, clacking his spoon against his bowl. “He thought it was kinda like Spy Kids, too! Anyway, Mommy, what’s a smushing?”)

//

Jake gets the call at three p.m. on a Monday, which is, like, really weird, considering the very first tip he got on the Pontiac Bandit at the tender age of twenty-five was on a Monday.

“Maybe it’s Fate,” says Charles, over his lentil soup, later that night at their dinner date. “Maybe there’s someone up there, destining you to –”

“Okay, first of all,” says Jake, “twenty-five is not _tender_ , Charles, that makes us sound weirdly old right now –”

“Fifties,” Charles reminds him, waving his spoon, like Jake doesn’t know he needs _orthopedics_ in his _sneakers_ , “go on.”

“Ew, Charles! Anyway, _no_ , it was not Fate –”

It _wasn’t_ Fate, Jake maintains, all through the drive home from the tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant that shockingly didn’t sell anything nearly as untoward as Charles’ usual buffalo intestine-style selection. It was a coincidence, because those things happen, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because –

“Dad,” says Maya, almost a week later, tapping her fingers against the window to the beat of the old-skool Taylor Swift that’s blasting out of their speakers, on the way home after school. “Dad, clearly, it matters somehow, if _just_ because you keep saying it doesn’t matter.”

Jake thinks that this is a supremely unfair accusation, especially made by one’s fifteen-year-old daughter while sitting in the car singing _Teardrops On My Guitar_ at the top of her lungs. This is not a normal situation. This is years of history, and frankly being humiliated one too many times, and crime lords and Florida and the Caribbean and that one time Jake, really drunk at an obscure bar after his dad passed away, ran into him and they somehow ended up on a couch watching _An American Tale_ together and crying. This is his arch nemesis – maybe not as bad as Hans Gruber or anything, but seriously, he is _not_ the only cop out there with an arch nemesis, okay? There was that nice guy at the conference in Miami two years ago, that Amy got invited to –

“Cordero’s nemesis was a _drug lord_ , Dad,” says Maya, who was at the time doing a science fair project on community safety in poor neighborhoods; A Thing that involved surveys (which meant Jake and Rosa escorting her through her door-to-door interviews, for emotional support and safety, respectively), and lots and lots of colour-coordinated bristol board. “She was like, _Figgis_ level evil.”

For Jake Peralta’s kid, who frequently announces her deep and abiding vendetta against The Math (something Jake has spent more hours than he can count trying to figure out with her with lots of help from their new friend Sal Khan on the internet), she had been surprisingly determined to ask millions of questions about crime statistics from those conference-goers. Not so surprising, he supposes, because asking excessive questions is pretty much literally integrated into Amy’s genetic code at this point.

Jake huffs.

“Alright, yes, _fine_ , arch nemesises are usually international crime bosses. But –”

“Dad, come on! _Admit_ that this was closure.”

Jake whistles the chorus of _You Belong With Me_ , his second-favorite song on the CD, to get out of answering. Maya crosses her arms over her borrowed NYU t-shirt and raises an eyebrow in a fashion that he’s not sure reminds him of Amy or himself.

Finally, Jake says, “I guess we’re … actually friends.”

An inarticulable feeling is slowly solidifying in his chest.

So rewind: he gets this phone call. He gets a phone call on a Monday, and he tucks the phone under his ear as he’s leaving his precinct on the way to his car and vaguely planning on driving by Mrs. Huang’s bodega on the way home to pick up a carton of milk for Benji and tampons for Maya, and maybe a bunch of flowers if Mrs. Huang’s daughter has any left in the back.

When he gets there, fingers buzzing with nerves he hasn’t felt in years and not even the faintest clue what to expect, the hospital is surprisingly inviting: the reception desk filled with flowers and colourful children’s paintings on the walls from a recent community project, something he’s pretty sure Amy mentioned offhandedly at the dinner table once. Jake slings his bag over his shoulder and sticks his phone into his jacket pocket, letting the nurse – Patty Nafisi, she’d said over the phone – lead him through the second floor hallway of Brooklyn Methodist to the room at the end of the hall.

Jake stands just inside the doorway for a whole minute.

He hasn’t actually seen Judy in … _years_ , at this point, something that he can’t really wrap his head around because suddenly the fact that he’s even _realizing_ this is making the buzzing in his fingers amplify tenfold – like they’re filled with the bees Benji loves talking about so much, and he wonders if maybe they’ve lost so many homes that they’ve just decided to illegally immigrate into his fingertips instead.

There’s grey at Doug Judy’s temples, laced into his wiry hair, and speckles of it in his beard too.

He’d look as frustratingly youthful as ever (“Don’t worry, Jake,” says Charles’s voice in his head, Maya and Benji laughing in the background, “you are _definitely_ the sole possessor of the mythical fountain of youth, there is no one else as well-aged as you are, buddy –”) 

If he wasn’t sporting such a spectacular black eye, the bruising tracing down his cheekbone and decorating his jaw and neck with swelling.

Jake swallows and steps into the room.

There’s a chair by the bed, plastic and kind of uncomfortable-looking, and Jake spends a whole two minutes walking around the room – back and forth, once in a circle around himself like an idiot, he really hopes Patty Nafisi isn’t watching or anything – before he finally heaves a big sigh that sounds a bit like a whistle and drops down into the chair, his foot tapping against the floor restlessly. His hands, which have stopped feeling like New Age beehives but are still a little tingly, rest on his knees, and he scratches at his jeans with his fingernails and wonders what in the name of all that is holy he’s supposed to do right now.

(“ _Is this a Sergeant Peralta?_ ”

“Uh – yeah, this is him. What’s up?”

“ _My name is Nurse Nafisi, I’m calling from the Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. We have a patient here with some serious injuries who’s asking to see you, sir_.”)

Jake bites his lip and leans back in the plastic chair, fingers pressing into his knees. Judy is asleep, he thinks – not in a coma, obviously, because he’d been awake before to _ask_ for him, of all things. But he’s certainly not responsive right now, and maybe that’s a little weird because everything Jake knows about him involves the adjectives _loud_ and _warm_ and _the worst_ and kind of maybe _larger than life._

Which is ridiculous, because he’s a criminal, and he’s been Jake’s arch nemesis since Jake was twenty-five, and maybe –

(Maybe that’s it. Maybe Jake’s put so much effort into making Doug Judy more of an idea than a real person, like he is, and Jake actually gets along really well with that Real Person –)

It’s just. The world feels so absurdly _wrong_ right now.

Because Doug Judy’s in a freakin’ hospital bed.

“Gross,” says Jake aloud, and slouches his shoulders, sliding down a little further in his chair. The heart monitor on the other side of the bed beeps, so at least that’s normal – as normal as a heart monitor can be, Jake guesses. It’s crazy, he thinks, because he’s very suddenly realizing that there’s always been a part of him that assumed Doug Judy was invincible.

“It makes sense,” Jake says out loud again, (to silence, there’s no response, God, this is _so_ weird –). “That, like – ugh. You always got away, or whatever. I thought you were probably protected by one of those Greek Myth things Maya’s into. Or like, you were secretly an action movie hero, they never die, only obviously you aren’t because that’s my job and also what the _hell_ , Judy, we’re in a _hospital_ right now.”

The heart monitor beeps at Jake. Jake suppresses the very powerful urge to beep right back at it, phonetically sounding out the beep and everything.

“You’re the worst,” says Jake, and because he has literally nothing else to do, he reaches out and grabs Judy’s hand.

It’s not cold, which makes him feel a little bit better about his life, and Jake focuses on the vase of fake flowers on the table across from him. They’re kind of super lame, he thinks, and if Amy were here she’d already be planning on the kind of flower arrangement they should order. Jake would argue that they could just buy some from Mrs. Huang, and she’d hum and agree and say, “Let’s put them on the bedside table, instead,” and then Rosa would show up because Jake would have texted her and say, “Santiago, that’s the worst colour for this room,” and Amy would be as shocked as she always is when Rosa gives aesthetic advice, and Doug Judy would wake up and be _fine_ because Jake cannot possibly fathom any other reality.

He chews at his bottom lip and glares at the plastic flowers in front of him, hating that he’s sitting here holding Judy’s hand and wondering what Judy could have possibly messed up in for everything to catch up with him, because Jake’s intimately familiar with having the living crap beaten out of you by the mob, and it all around really sucks, pretty much.

Under his breath, Jake starts humming the tune of _If I Were A Rich Man_.

“See,” comes a croaking voice, “it’s cliched romantic moments like these that make us such an adorable couple.”

Jake is not proud to say that he yelps out loud.

And pulls his hand away as though burned.

Judy blinks at him, slow and sluggish through the swelling at his temple, but he’s smiling, and Jake swallows and stares at him like an idiot.

Finally:

“You’re the worst,” says Jake, his voice very slightly hoarse. “Did you know that? The literal _worst_. I had to buy my daughter tampons and instead I came here.”

“Yeah,” croaks Judy, half-shrugging in a way that looks kind of painful to Jake. And maybe it’s the fact that he looks like he was used as someone’s personal punching bag, or maybe it’s the grey in his hair, or maybe it’s the hesitation in his voice, but – “I – I can’t believe you actually came.”

Jake blinks.

And suddenly he’s thinking about catching that Giggle Pig guy Ruiz, and about the super dope-ass suite, and the USB he got in Florida and baby onsies. He’s thinking about Spy Kids and the Caribbean and he feels himself slump back against the uncomfortable plastic chair and raise an eyebrow at Doug Judy.

“I’d be a pretty terrible best friend if I didn’t,” says Jake, after a long moment. “Or whatever.”

Judy’s smile looks a lot less painful, this time, even if it is still as infuriating as always.

“Love you, man.”

Jake feels himself grin, and thinks, _the worst_.

“Love you too, Judy.”

**Author's Note:**

> NOTES, O-HO:
> 
> \- the line, "my partner in the field and in the wonderful journey of life" is nabbed from the wonderful fic Think Once, Think Twice by Fahye here on ao3, which is truly one of the most beautiful things I've ever read
> 
> \- credit goes to @elsaclack for many of the headcanons, because this fic is the product of us yelling together about doug judy just _always being there_ and also how perfect it'd be if the trope Totally Necessary Mobster-Induced Drama that b99's officially used now can be extended to include the general plot of Spy Kids
> 
> \- this fic is within the same universe as "nine and a half bowls" and "girl with kaleidoscope eyes", though a little different in style and purpose.
> 
> \- hopefully it _has_ style and purpose and isn't a prosial mess
> 
> \- jake and judy's relationship is one of my favorite things abt the show, specifically how much they'd be Great Friends were jake's sense of justice not so utterly black and white and judy no so much The Worst. i really hope it's developed to _more_ than just jake yelling his name angrily into the sky, hilarious as that may be, because i feel like the drama with figgis opens a perfect opportunity for judy to actually _help_ the squad, something that would definitely throw jake for a loop and make him reexamine things and also grow as a character. this is me playing around with that for like, 14k, whoops, it never meant to be that obscenely long,
> 
> \- anyways, not my best work, but i loved writing it and i hope u enjoyed!!!
> 
> \- EDIT: i completely forgot to mention for those of Unaware™ that "If I Were a Rich Man" is one of the most iconic songs from the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof, the entirety of which I (and this is only partially in jest) #canconfirm all Jewish kids know off by heart by roughly six or seven years old
> 
> \- if u haven't seen it, you really, REALLY should


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